The One-Dimensional University: The Destructive Matrimony Of Applied Scientific Discipline Together With Administration
Sunday, June 29, 2008
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Close to 50 years ago, Herbert Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man, a radical criticism of contemporary social club that has much to tell nearly the electrical flow basis only about us. Marcuse’s primal claim was that technological automation extends science’s domination over nature to a social domination over individuals. This domination occurs through a “total administration,” where managers oversee the rationalization of the social condition quo through the elimination of all criticism in addition to the provision of desired social goods. Perhaps, what nosotros are seeing at the University of California is entirely the logical extension of Marcuse’s insightful analysis.
Not entirely does it seem that administrators cause got taken over the university, but they are promoting a shape of didactics that transforms students into passive memorizers of standardized information. With the force to motion students through the academy organisation inwards an efficient in addition to cost-effective manner, didactics is reimagined equally an automated human assembly line. Meanwhile, students inwards large classes are socialized to internalize fragmented information without whatever possibility of interacting amongst cognition inwards a critical or creative manner. All of these tendencies opened upward up the door for an online didactics programme that envisions majority producing standardized courses to an anonymous educatee body.
While this degradation of didactics increases, the academy becomes a house of tax-exempt uppercase accumulation in addition to a interrogation fly of the military-industrial complex in addition to the pharmaceutical-medical complex. As biological scientific discipline is turned into genetic code in addition to civilization becomes digital code, nosotros uncovering Marcuse’s alert that every expression of social club is beingness re-interpreted through the linguistic communication of functionality in addition to instrumentality. After all, the academic evolutionary psychologists in addition to neuroscientists right away order us that nosotros are aught but biological computers programmed past times nature. Here, nosotros cause got choke things (computers) equally things are given the ability of people. For Marcuse, this confusion betwixt subjects in addition to objects is the terminate final result of full technological rationality.
The lasting ikon of this transformation of didactics into administered functionality may live the representation of a campus police describe officeholder pepper spraying prone students amongst an mental attitude of full indifference. In the alienated basis of planning, management, in addition to calculation, in that location is no infinite for tension, dissent, or difference. Or maybe, the novel logo for the academy is an fifty-fifty ameliorate representation of the truth of how the management sees the students: hither the direction replaces pepper spray amongst urine equally it reimagines the academy to live the giant Urinal of California. I tell it is ameliorate to live pissed off than pissed on, in addition to nosotros require to create everything inwards our ability to retake the academy from the hands of administered technological rationality.
Not entirely does it seem that administrators cause got taken over the university, but they are promoting a shape of didactics that transforms students into passive memorizers of standardized information. With the force to motion students through the academy organisation inwards an efficient in addition to cost-effective manner, didactics is reimagined equally an automated human assembly line. Meanwhile, students inwards large classes are socialized to internalize fragmented information without whatever possibility of interacting amongst cognition inwards a critical or creative manner. All of these tendencies opened upward up the door for an online didactics programme that envisions majority producing standardized courses to an anonymous educatee body.
While this degradation of didactics increases, the academy becomes a house of tax-exempt uppercase accumulation in addition to a interrogation fly of the military-industrial complex in addition to the pharmaceutical-medical complex. As biological scientific discipline is turned into genetic code in addition to civilization becomes digital code, nosotros uncovering Marcuse’s alert that every expression of social club is beingness re-interpreted through the linguistic communication of functionality in addition to instrumentality. After all, the academic evolutionary psychologists in addition to neuroscientists right away order us that nosotros are aught but biological computers programmed past times nature. Here, nosotros cause got choke things (computers) equally things are given the ability of people. For Marcuse, this confusion betwixt subjects in addition to objects is the terminate final result of full technological rationality.
The lasting ikon of this transformation of didactics into administered functionality may live the representation of a campus police describe officeholder pepper spraying prone students amongst an mental attitude of full indifference. In the alienated basis of planning, management, in addition to calculation, in that location is no infinite for tension, dissent, or difference. Or maybe, the novel logo for the academy is an fifty-fifty ameliorate representation of the truth of how the management sees the students: hither the direction replaces pepper spray amongst urine equally it reimagines the academy to live the giant Urinal of California. I tell it is ameliorate to live pissed off than pissed on, in addition to nosotros require to create everything inwards our ability to retake the academy from the hands of administered technological rationality.